This is the prequel episode of our podcast, in this episode, Mark and I are (finally) relaunching the podcast.

After almost five months without releasing an episode, we have decided to start the whole process again from scratch.

This means that if you were a subscriber previously, you will have to resubscribe either on iTunes, Soundcloud or Stitcher.

During the relaunch of the podcast, we will release two new episodes weekly and rebroadcast 1 episode from our previous feed so that the new subscribers can discover these episodes and the former subscribers can re-enjoy them.

Expect new episodes every Monday, Wednesday and Friday until the end of February.

Let’s now talk about what you will find inside the Authority Hacker Podcast.

We debated for a long time regarding the content of the podcast and decided to expand the scope of what you usually find in Authority Hacker and go beyond pure tactical tips you often find on Authority Hacker.

Instead, we decided to embrace the lifestyle of the laptop entrepreneur and talk about broader topics around four main pillars:

Online Marketing Tips & Tactics

This is the more hardcore online marketing podcasts, in these episodes, we will talk about a particular case study, tactic or aspect of running authority sites, our experience and tips to make the most of it.

Some of the episodes you can expect in this category are:

Facebook Ads Vs SEO, Which one should you start with?

Associating the right goal with the right content & making content marketing profitable

Hacks, Books & Tools for Entrepreneurs

These podcast episodes will zoom out a bit and talk about running an online business in general.

Things will stay practical of course. But will apply to most online entrepreneurs, even if you don’t run authority sites the way we do.

Gael: And this is the first podcast that we have been releasing in about 4 months. We used to have a podcast before, but the truth is- we haven’t been very consistent with it, and so we are relaunching it and being way more consistent, we have a huge back log of episodes ready, and you should be receiving at least one episode every week. And for the relaunch, we are going to have several episodes a week coming to you guys including some old ones but also a lot of new ones, so stay tuned if you like the old podcast- you are going to love this one. Now, before we get started with the podcast, let’s talk about what the Authority Hacker is. Authority Hacker is about the creation of 6 to 7 figure a year content based business. So, blogs and authority sites, essentially. And it started with just me and Mark talking about our site healthambition.com essentially, which is one of the main sites we work on, and eventually there has been a community creating around the website where other people creating the same kind of bigger websites started to share their experience with us and we started reporting about that on Authority Hacker. And so, the idea is that unlike many other online marketing sites where you have people that don’t necessary do that stuff write about that stuff, while you get actually the first hand experience from people running these projects and running these kind of sites expressing what they find working and what they found not working and you’ll find that is usually very different from what you read on other sites where the people don’t actually do that stuff.

Mark: Yeah, I think a lot of this was born out of our own frustration it’s fair to say, and that we are reading a lot of these online marketing blogs and they are recommending all these tools and tactics and in all honesty- a lot of them are just recommending products which have the biggest affiliate program pay out so they make money off of. We want to sort of take a different approach and tell you what actually works and in many cases we recommend free tools and free software which we don’t earn anything from.

Gael: Yeah, and also the tactics are going to be quite different and usually the stuff that people talk about is a rewrite of something that was done 12 months ago, it’s not necessarily true again today etc. So we try to really only have people that actually do that stuff right on Authority Hacker whether with us or whether it’s other website owners. And finally, what we really enjoy is finding ways to optimize and scale and automate all of these processes using tools and using smart workflows, so we are going to be talking a lot about that and we are going to have a whole part of the podcast talking about that because it’s always that idea of these automated business that run itself, it never really ends up being that way. But, there are a lot of things that you can automate in smart ways using tools like IFTTT, also email automation and so on, and we are going to talk about that as well, because as online entrepreneur your time is the most scarce resource that you have even more than money, it’s like if you have a business that does well, getting money is really not that difficult. Now, let’s just talk about what you’ll find in these podcasts, and the goal when I went to conferences, I’ve been watching people talk on stage and usually it is people overblowing the results of a really exceptional case study of how well one of their campaign did. And the truth is there was value in that but the most value I ever got out of going to hang out with other online marketers was usually around the bar, after the party around 11 pm, going to the bar and talking to that guy who has been drinking 2 or 3 beers already, talking about our stuff where he would share the specific little trick or tip that he found that changed quite a lot of his results and stuff, and that is the value I got out of going to conferences and the goal of this podcast is to replicate these kind of conversations, this kind of like at the bar late at night at conferences talks, minus the alcohol in that case but raw discussions with people that really do that stuff and share tips openly, do not try to hide anything.

Mark: Yeah so the thing is in internet marketing, there is so much information out there in your entire life if all you did was read information, watch videos, you never had time to consume it all so it can be quite tricky sometimes to figure out where to spend your time and what information to really focus on and to consume, so in a way we wanted to create a site which kind of did that for you so we kind of cultivate and filter out a lot of the BS out there and just give you the sort of 20% that really makes the difference to your business.

Gael: Yep, and in terms of the format, it’s mostly going to be me and Mark, we actually did shows with guests and we are going to rebroadcast some of them in the next few weeks but the truth is in terms of ratings, in a previous podcast we have much higher ratings when it was just me and Mark so we are actually going to do mostly me and Mark and sometimes we are going to invite guests when they are relevant but we are not going to do the typical interview type podcast that you can hear in many other places feel free to check these other podcasts out, it’s not what you are going to find here. And what’s really important as well is we will not shy away from expressing opinion, if we think something is shit, we are going to call it shit and that’s it. And we are just going to tell you how it is, no cotton candy around things, and if you’ve read the Authority Hacker blog you probably know that already. And finally, there are 4 types of discussion angles that we are going to have. The first type is really like online marketing tactic related where we are going to talk about a specific case study we’ve done, we are going to talk about specific traffic tools that we’ve used, and the results we’ve had, the pros and cons of it. You can just literally copy and paste into your business. Then we are going to talk more about tips, tricks and tools that that are in the podcast that we are going to be releasing, we are going to be talking about the tools we use for optimizing our productivity for example or how we increase engagement on Facebook, or how we manage email marketing without spending hours on it, so we are going to be talking about these things, it’s going to be a mixture of tools and workflows and tips and tricks. Then we are going to talk also about the lifestyle related to running this kind of online businesses. The truth is I am recording this from my iMac at home here but Mark and I do spend most of the time of the year living laptop life style where we just take our laptop, go into cool place in the world, work six hours a day and then go visit the rest of the time and enjoy life as we are still young and we can still enjoy it.

So we are going to talk about building that lifestyle for you guys and really funny stuff like, handling your finances like hacking miles and that kind of stuff.

Mark: And sort of explaining how it really is because you often get sold on this vision where you are working 15 minutes a week and just drinking cocktails on the beach the whole time- it’s not really like that although some days it is. So we sort of tell you how it really is.

Gael: And also how you can get there. Finally, the last type of podcast we are going to have more about mindset psychology and motivations, it is just going to be about these limiting beliefs that maybe are stopping you from making any kind of progress like, “What if I am not an authority in my niche” or, “What if I don’t like writing”, or “How do I motivate myself when I’m working alone in my room”, these kinds of questions that do not directly reflect on your website but they are going to reflecting on how much gets done with your company and how quickly you grow and eventually, if you ever get started at all. So these are very important things to talk about and Mark and I are pretty philosophical like we like to think about these things quite a lot so I think you guys are going to like it, we read quite a lot as well sow e are going to have a bunch of book recommendations and so on. And so, that is what we are going to talk about in this four kinds of podcast that you are going to find on the Authority Hacker podcast. Now we are going to just finish this intro episode that’s a really short one, but it’s just an intro, and we are going to be uploading a bunch of episodes as you are listening to this one so you are going to have at least two more episodes today and there’s going to be more episodes releasing every two or three days. But before we close this podcast, I just want to talk about who we are actually, because if you have been following us for a little bit- you know who we are but if you haven’t, if you are just discovering us today, then let us just explain where we come from and what we do. So I’ll let you start, Mark actually.

Mark: Ok. So this always takes ages when I explain this to people.

Gael: You have five minutes.

Mark: So I’ll try and keep it succinct for you. So, I’m from the UK, just by my accent and about 6 years ago now I quit my job- I used to work in London for typical sort of 9 to 5 finance company, I hated it. I quit my job, I went traveling around Asia. During the time I was traveling I had various non online jobs shall we say, I was a scuba diving instructor at one point, I was a farmer at one point as well, actual farming, some crazy stuff like that, it was an adventure shall we say. And then, I ran into I actually met Gael in Singapore, in a bar, as I was traveling through and we sort of exchanged Facebook details, we were both on our way to Kuala Lumpur, and while we were there we sort of became friends. I had been around about that time I had discovered this place called ODesk and I was working on ODesk as a project manager for an American web design company. Prior to all this, while I was still at the job I had been experimenting shall we say with a few like affiliate websites and some PPC and things like that but never really had much success. So after I met Gael it was like one night we were out drinking, actually we were drinking a lot if I remember correctly, and decided it would be an awesome idea to start a business building websites and doing SEO for people, as I knew a bit of building websites, Gael knew a bit of SEO. So actually, the next night, we did that. And I think one night we actually planned out and established a website, and figured a bunch of stuff out. And from there, we really just kind of started to get our first few clients and it took about six months I think after that of not so much happening before we realized we had a business, or what could become a business. It was 4 or 5 client s at the time and-

Gael: We were making $400 a month, it wasn’t a lot but-

Mark: Yeah. We made the decision like let’s just quit our jobs and make a goal of this full time, which was a bit of a random and somewhat risky decision at the time, but I think we made the right decision. So then we started an agency, digital marketing agency together, we ran that for about 4, 5 years, we were about half way through that, we figured at least for me, we figured yeah this isn’t really what we want to do running an agency it was too much like still having a job. Although we were making good money some months, we had a really big team of like 30 people at one point, it was a lot of hassle to run and it was very difficult to scale beyond where we were. We sort of looked at all these people that ran websites and we could do that too. I mean, we know all, how to do all the marketing side anyway. So we then started just randomly had the idea to start healthambition.com which is a health website which we still run today and we show case that a lot in many case studies and on Authority Hacker on the blog. So we started that and it was somewhat of a serious focus but it still wasn’t our main focus and then about a year and a half ago, a year ago something like that, we decided, we ran across a guy who told us that he could sell our agency for us, if we wanted to get out of it. So, we thought ok, cool, let’s give that a go. So we found a buyer really quickly, we sold that company and we started focusing full time on building these authority sites. So for like the past year, we’ve been doing this full time, for the past three years we’ve been this part time. And yeah, that’s pretty much, pretty much my story I think.

Gael: Well that’s good because that’s basically most of my story too. Because essentially, the only difference from my story, from my part of the story is that when it started I was just a French student that got a job in Kuala Lumpur after he graduated and I was on my way to Singapore and then we met in Kuala Lumpur and we started the agency and basically we had the same story from that point. So, that is pretty easy but one thing I want to say, is that we actually learned a lot form the agency business, and even though we only have been authority site for a few years the online marketing side of things, given the amount of hours we worked on that I’d say we can qualify for ten year experience.

Mark: Yeah, I mean, we’ve worked with I’d say over 1000 different clients on a 1000 different sites at this point. And, we’ve seen everything from startups to tech companies, 400, 500 companies, yeah we worked for them all so we know how it all works or doesn’t work in some cases, and yeah we have I think somewhat unique insight into the industry from that perspective.

Gael: Yeah, I think on important thing to say as well in terms of online marketing is that we started as gray hat SEOs, we definitely come from SEO background, and we come from a gray hat SEO background. We come from gaming the system and cheating and getting links that way and we used to do really well with that, until Google did their dates around 2012. But then, obviously this stopped working and I know some people are still trying to make it work but I have yet to see someone making 7 figures a year that still does that, which I don’t think there is many anymore. And so, we actually learned all the ethical marketing and all the more legit side of stuff after but we kept that kind of like very efficient kind of wanting to automate stuff mentality after that and I think that was a great mentality and that’s something that helped us disrupt the white hat world when we launched Authority Hacker especially. And Authority Hacker gained quite a bit of traction in 2015 so we are pretty happy with that and I think that this kind of mentality is something you guys are going to appreciate, it’s very practical, we are not talking about creating great content and engaging users and all that stuff, we are going to talk about exactly where you click, which tool you use and exactly how to do this with templates. So that is basically what you are going to find in the Authority Hacker podcast.

Mark: Yes, it’s much more practical approach to like what really works shift through the BS kind of way of thinking.

Gael: Yep, so that’s basically for the intro show, Mark, do you have anything to add?

Mark: No.

Gael: All right, so we’ll see you guys in the next episode, to talk about the actual authority site model and we are going to be breaking it down, we are going to be talking about our experience doing it and so on so just make sure you download the next episode it should be available at the same time as this one and we’ll see you guys in the next episode.